Flying Buttress - History

History

Although fully fledged flying buttresses only developed in the Gothic period, their precursors can be found in Byzantine architecture and in some Romanesque buildings, such as Durham Cathedral, where quadrant arches were used to carry the lateral thrust of the stone vault over the aisles. However these arches were hidden under the gallery roof and only transmitted the forces to the massive outer walls. By the 1160s, architects in the Île-de-France were employing similar systems but with longer and finer arches running from the outer surface of the clerestory wall, over the roof of the side aisles (and hence visible from the outside) to meet a heavy vertical buttress rising above the level of the outer wall. The main advantage of such systems is that the outer walls no longer need to be heavy and massive enough to resist the lateral thrusts of the vault. Instead the wall surface could be reduced (allowing larger windows filled with stained glass), with the vertical mass concentrated into external buttresses. Early flying buttresses tended to be far heavier than is required for the static loads involved, as for example at Chartres (c. 1210) and around the apse of the Basilica of St Remi in Reims, which is thought to be among the earliest examples still surviving in its original form (dating from around 1170). Later architects progressively refined these designs and slimmed down the flyers until typically they were constructed from no more than one thickness of voussoir with a capping stone above it (see for example the cathedrals of Amiens, Le Mans and Beauvais.

Later Gothic buildings continued to use flying buttresses but often embellished them with crockets on the flyers and figural sculpture in niches or aedicules set into the buttresses. Renaissance and later architecture eschewed the flying buttress in favour of thick-wall construction. However the design was revived by Canadian architect William P. Anderson to build lighthouses at the beginning of the 20th century.